Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Here's why, right from the first paragraph:"Despite continued sluggishness in the display ad market, Internet advertising will increase its share of overall ad spending to 15 percent next year, for a total of almost $65 billion globally, according to a new forecast from GroupM."

Now most people may jump up and say 'Yippeee! digital is still going strong!'. But this is utterly a reinforcement of the old school way of thinking is to just measure 'media' spending as digital investment.

Smart marketers are investing in platforms (social, community or otherwise) as a core strategy to reduce their overall spending as a whole. Marketers need to stop just thinking about 'working' dollars and start looking at their overall production and IT investments as part of the overall marketing mix. The ROI of campaigns is not just about the measure of awareness and brand recall - but needs to look at the overall investment and the actions that people take.

Companies investing in creating platforms that engage prospects and customers 52/24/7 won't care what the 'industry' is predicting the media spend will be. They know that they can reach people more often, for less money.